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As we all know, the temporariness of beauty and the destroying power of time is a theme which attracts most of the serious writers all through the literary history. Especially, Shakespeare's concern with time, as a destroyer of youth and beauty, is said to be a fundamental theme of his Southampton sonnets (sonnets 1-126). Time, with his swift pace, progresses to eternity like a thief, steals hours and days, and finally wrecks and despoils love and friendship not to mention of physical beauty as well. He swallows up everything, and ‘nothing stands but for his scythe to mow’. But Shakespeare's concept of time in the first half of his sonnets is relatively superficial or imaginary, viewing time not as a real threat but as an abstract terror which is to come only in the future, very far from the present perfection of beauty. This attitude toward time, however, changes in the latter half of the sonnets. He now comes to see time as a more realistic, vivid, and personal object of terror, not as a literary metaphor any more. As a result of this change, he gives up trying to persuade the young man to marry and have as many children as possible, as a way to overcome the destructive power of time. He also abandons poetic immortalization of youth through a subtle analysis of time to win its power in the aesthetic context. He now realizes that it is not poetry or children that can defeat time but love itself, which lasts forever. Love is the last, but the best way to transcend all dilemmas of the world. To love others with a unique perspective on life could be the only way out of the world where everything seems to come under the dominion of time.